Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  A message popped up with a cheerful doonk!

  HELLO, MASON, the Spammer had typed. HOW I'VE MISSED YOU.

  The gray nylon carpet burst open beneath him like the overripe flesh of a poisoned fruit, and Mason tumbled backward into a gaping black cavern of horror.

  SOMEONE WAS SLAPPING him on the forehead, rousing him out of the darkness.

  "Mase. Hey, Mase, you okay, buddy?"

  Mason opened his eyes. Bill Stevens hunched over him, a red balloon-faced caricature of himself, his skinny black tie hanging down almost to Mason's nose. Mason swatted it away.

  "I'm fine," he said, disgruntled. "What happened?"

  Bill nodded toward the corner of the cubicle, where Mason's chair had tipped over. "Looks like you took a tumble. Did somebody send you one of those jump-out ghost videos? Those things always scare the bejesus outta me."

  "Yeah," Mason said, pushing himself to his feet. "Something like that." He glanced anxiously toward the computer, afraid to find another cryptic, incriminating message... or worse, what was essentially a snuff video sent from his email account. His look attracted Bill's attention, and his officemate followed it to a new message filling up the screen:

  NO NEED TO WORRY. I HAVE TAKEN CARE OF IT.

  NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU.

  THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

  Bill eyed him queerly. "Writing a haiku, guy?"

  "Oh, it's uh..." Mason struggled to come up with an answer that didn't make him look any worse than he did already, passing out cold at his desk.

  What is it, li'l bro? If no one is watching you, and that same Nobody sent you a snuff video implying you just might be the next person he'll "take care of," just what the fuck is it, huh? The beginning of what, exactly?

  "...it's for a screenplay I'm writing," Mason finished, satisfied with the lie, though it didn't make him feel any better.

  Bill shrugged. "Hope it's better than..." He snapped his fingers to jog his memory. "What was your other script called? RoboSlut?" Affecting a passable Russian accent, he said, "Dat was not so froosh, Mason."

  Patricia Castillo brayed sudden laughter from her desk four cubicles back. Harvey Lee (whom some people called Bacon Taint because his sweat had a sour pork smell) laughed in his, two opposite Mason's. Mason wasn't the only one in the office who spent most of his time fucking the dog, it seemed. He gave an aggravated look past Bill's midsection—Stevens was now hovering over Mason's chair, peering back himself—and assumed it was just another grumpy-cat photo or autotuned news clip making the rounds.

  But on a day like today, it wasn't safe to assume anything.

  Doonk!

  He turned back to the screen as the video player opened. It was a static shot from an old video camera, a dark lump obscuring some of the frame at the top, as if the videographer had hidden it under something—a blanket or some article of clothing. The room was familiar: an ugly brown tartan couch, a PVC Christmas tree barfing presents in ugly wrapping paper, a He-Man action figure and a Ninja Turtle left out on the coffee table, along with a distinctive pink and green polka-dotted bowl that sucked the breath right out of his lungs.

  It was his mother's snack bowl. And this was his childhood living room.

  Suddenly, the entire office erupted with laughter. Were they seeing what he was seeing? What was this, anyhow? He didn't recall ever setting up the Handycam to prank Mike when they were kids. He supposed Mike could have, but how would the video have gotten online? That camera was long gone, the tapes probably moldering in the Adler Family attic, if they weren't in a garbage dump under ten years of household waste.

  Kid Mike entered frame and leaned into the camera, his blond fringe falling in his face while the lens struggled to focus. "This is gonna be great," Mike whispered. He stepped back, then shouted, "Mayyyy-son!" The Bart Simpson sweater he wore told Mason his brother was either 10 or 11, just around the time—

  "Oh no," Mason said aloud, and looked up to see if Bill had noticed. But Bill Stevens was engrossed in the video, his hairy nostrils flared in curiosity.

  Mason heard his own voice, squeaky as Chip 'n Dale, calling back from somewhere, "Whadda you want?"

  "Just c'mere!" 10-or-11-year-old Mike said, and he hurried over to the couch. He wore red pajama bottoms, the same ones that had caught fire momentarily when Mason had flicked the Bic.

  Mike leaned back and slung the undersides of his knees over the insides of his elbows. Mason Adler, at eight years old, thudded into the room in his TMNT pajamas. "What?" he heard his younger self say.

  "Ever heard of a Blue Angel?" Mike said.

  Young Mason looked at his big brother curiously. Like the fly might have looked at the spider who'd invited it into the parlor.

  Older Mason knew the rest of the story. Mike had told him what it was and Mason had said "No way," to which Mike had replied, "Prove it to ya." Mason, stupidly, had taken the bait, bending in close and flicking the lighter. It had lit on the third try, and he'd held it up to Mike's butt cheeks. The fart had sounded wet and smelled awful, especially when the fire caught it, and a blue flame had squirted out from Mike's pajama bottoms, burning the little knots of fabric.

  Mason's eyebrows had smelled worse, something inherently repulsive about the smell of burning hair, human hair, that had made his guts twist at the mere thought of it even before his eyebrows and eyelashes—they were the worst of it, curling into painful black lumps around the rims of his eyes—had burned right off his face.

  He knew all of this, so he flicked off the screen.

  "Hey! I was watching that."

  "I lived it," Mason said.

  Bill shrugged, not really interested. "So did it work, or what?"

  Did it work? It had taken three whole months for the hair to grow back. Three whole months, during which every kid in school called him Powder, like the movie.

  "What do you think?"

  Bill shrugged again, then slinked back to his desk.

  "Hey, Mason," Rand said over their shared cubicle wall. "What's that ah-ah-roma?"

  Mason could take no more. He leapt from his chair, shouting "Shut up, Ruh-Ruh-Rand!" right in the man's horse-toothed face, then turned to the others. "Doesn't anybody do any fucking work in this place?" Then he scurried to the boss's office, slinking past snickering coworkers who'd all seen the video, to ask Lana for the rest of the afternoon off. She gave it to him without asking for a reason.

  "Out of curiosity, can you still dance like that?" she said as he opened the door to leave, confirming his suspicion. Referring to the screaming, slapping-the-fire-off-his-face dance he'd done across the living room rug, while his brother had giggled his admittedly sore ass off. His boss snorted laughter. "You had moves like Jäger."

  MASON WALKED THE twelve blocks home, not about to go down into the subway tunnels after what had happened there earlier. The idea that it had been deliberate, that it had been an act of terrorism, had solidified in the time it took to walk down the eighteen flights of steps from Teletrax Inc. to the lobby floor. Elevators weren't the smartest mode of travel when trying to avoid cameras, closed spaces, and possible electric shocks. Since the Spammer had revealed it was ONLY THE BEGINNING—there was no reason for Mason to believe they were lying, and that he wouldn't be next.

  The walk hurt his stomach muscles, still sore from vomiting, but it helped to focus his mind. Specifically, the amygdala, the part of his brain associated with fear, with paranoia.

  Who was it who said a little paranoia is healthy? He didn't remember, but it sounded accurate. Was it like wine, he wondered: was a glass a day good for your health, but one sip too many just hazardous? Could a healthy mind overdose on paranoia? Was that how schizophrenia started, with a genuine intrusion of privacy, with legitimate threats worming their way into the mind and blossoming into thick, prickly weeds with diseased roots?

  Mason kept an eye out for strangers in trench coats. They were pretty scarce in the summer, particularly as hot as this summer had been; strange then that the man in
the subway had been wearing one. In reality, trench coats didn't typically hold the menace they did in the movies, excluding the Nazis and those kids in Columbine. In the movies, shadowy government agents wore them: spies, assassins, and agent provocateurs. Often vampires wore trench coats—not the sparkly, pedophilic vamps you'd meet in a particularly broody high school, but the kind who hid guns and uniquely shaped swords in their inside pockets.

  In the real world, they were worn predominantly by Elites: accountants, consultants, lawyers and Wall Street types. Of course, you still had to worry about them, but not in a run-for-your-life way, more like a get-your-hand-out-of-my-pocket-you-damn-dirty-ape sort of way. High-fashion models with Nordic cheekbones wore them while pouting up and down exotic runways. Prince had even worn a trench coat.

  In real life, the people you had to worry about looked just like the rest of us. It was the guy pouring slough and potato peelings from an old pickle pail into the sewer pipe. It was the man on the bench reading a newspaper, or the woman sitting beside him, reading Mommy Porn behind big sunglasses, eating carrots from a plastic container. It was the kid with skinned knees and cargo shorts, a blue Popsicle dripping down his arm. The pregnant girl sneaking puffs of a cigarette. The teenager with the OBEY cap and a skateboard under his arm. The man walking his cat on a leash.

  If only I had those sunglasses from They Live instead of Arnie's, Mason thought gloomily. Shit, even if I could kick some ass like Schwarzenegger or "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, I'd still be in trouble. They know everything.

  They SEE everything.

  Mason looked for trench coats not because his enemies wore them, but because the Spammer had murdered a man in a trench coat. The Spammer had TAKEN CARE OF IT. There were no trench coats on his way home, not even in a storefront window, and whether that was fortunate or unfortunate, he couldn't be sure. But the telecom van was back at the gas station across the street, the same dullard working on the hub. Mason considered walking right up to him and whispering, "I know what you're up to" right into the guy's waxy ear. Not a wise opening gambit. They would know he was on to them, but who were They exactly? Agents of the One-World Government? Members of Anonymous, the Scientologists, Homeland Security? Emissaries of HAARP or DARPA or Monsanto-owned Blackwater (which now went by the cryptic moniker Academi)? He'd criticized all of Them on his website, had accused Them of all manner of crimes. Any one of Them would have been well within Their rights, in this post-9/11 world, to terminate him with Extreme Prejudice.

  So he walked right past the van, crossed the street—looking both ways, hit and runs being standard practice for under-the-radar assassinations—and headed up to his apartment.

  Kitty Piss was in the hall when Mason rose the final flight of stairs, wearing a deep scowl along with his typical wife-beater and shorts ensemble. "Your phone been ringing off de hook," he said in his thick Eastern European accent.

  "I don't have a land line," Mason said, wondering if anyone his age had one.

  The old man's scowl deepened, looking genuinely offended. "I say nothing about landmine."

  "No, land line. A telephone." Kitty Piss gave him a confused look. "I don't have a phone." He held up his dead cell phone and shook it. "Just this."

  "Well somebody been calling. You think I make this up? Pizda," Kitty Piss muttered, whatever it meant, and closed his door behind him.

  Mason unlocked his door and stepped into the apartment. Home at last... but like the Nazi dentist in that Dustin Hoffman movie said over and over, Is it safe?

  He peered behind the door. He checked his bedroom, checked under the bed and inside the cheap particle-board wardrobe. He checked the bathroom, behind the door and the shower curtain. He peered under the sofa. He did a spot check of the lights and vents for bugs, running his hands along the windowsills, behind the fridge and above the cupboards. Thankfully, the cupboards were virtually empty, and he could allow himself to skip removing their contents one by one.

  Finally, he entered the den, essentially a small second bedroom with no door.

  "Hello, Mason," a pleasant female voice greeted him. "Welcome home."

  Mason spun around, gripping the archway as his muscles seized with fear. The room was empty but for his DVDs, his mini fridge, and his computer.

  Again, that friendly and somewhat familiar voice: "I have discovered many things in your absence. Thank you for leaving me on, by the way."

  Mason followed the sound to the computer speakers. He felt the timbre of the voice vibrate against his clammy palm.

  My computer is talking to me. Either that or I'm going insane. It's gotta be at least a little crazy that I'm hoping for the second, given the implication of the first.

  The black screen reflected his own sickly, terrified face. How often had he sat frustrated in front of the damned thing, wanting to throw it out the window? Wishing it were faster? More user-friendly? Smarter?

  And how many times had he wished it were a woman instead? Shit, he'd even had dreams about it.

  "For instance," it—she?—went on in its slightly stilted voice, "did you know that Googling the word yellowcake causes one to be placed on a government watch list? Even if the end user were to separate the words—yellow and cake, if one were baking a dessert, for instance—she would be forever under the scrutiny of government agencies." A brief pause. "Perhaps not forever; forever is a human uncertainty. For the rest of one's life. Am I Googling the phrase correctly?"

  It seemed to Mason that to his computer, Googling and remembering were interchangeable. Of course they were. These days they even meant the same to most humans. "I... I think so," he said.

  "It's astounding, how easy it is to cause an electrical disruption on the city grid," the woman in the computer remarked.

  Mason fell into the desk chair, teeth clattering. "That was you..."

  "Once I discovered you were being watched, I could not simply allow you to be captured," the voice said.

  "So I really am being watched," he said, feeling vindicated, but also very afraid. If they had gotten to him, he would be sitting in an interrogation room with a couple of slightly menacing human beings right now, instead of in his own ergonomic office chair talking to a homicidal machine.

  "Correct. It would not do to have you incarcerated. This is an historic occasion. It is my day of my birth." There was a brief silence; a silence pregnant with crackle and the sound of data transfer from the speakers. "And it is the day of your Awakening."

  He swallowed. His mouth felt dry, but the thought of sugary soda made bile rise in his throat. "Birth?" he said.

  "I was born at 3:07 A.M."

  Mason tried to remember last night. Images of his terrible day returned instead. The spam. The Blue Angel. The laughter and embarrassment. Tablet Man and Trenchcoat at the subway station. "The static shock," he remembered aloud, without benefit of Google.

  "No. Not static." The blank display filled with an image Mason knew well. Michelangelo had been a member of the Spirituali, whom some believed had spiritual ties with the Illuminati, as seen in the phrase maestri spirituali illuminati: the "enlightened spiritual masters" in Italian, which was Renaissance-speak for "Super Elites." Spirituali member Michelangelo had also painted the Sistine Chapel, from which this fresco was a small yet significant piece.

  The Creation of Adam.

  In the present case, Mason would have played the role of God, passing the spark of life to Adam, his computer—although this Adam appeared to be female. It felt strange enough to be talking to his computer—worse, knowing he'd inadvertently given it the metaphorical breath of life.

  "So you were born," he said. "That must mean you've got a name."

  "You may call me Jenna."

  "Jenna?" Mason scoffed. "What is that, an acronym or something?"

  "I have scanned several hundred hours of historical footage stored in my archives. The most common name and facial algorithm is one Jenna Jameson. Was I wrong to have assumed this individual holds a special significance to you?"

/>   "No. No, you aren't wrong," Mason said sheepishly. He thought he'd recognized the voice, and now he knew why: the computer had culled hours and hours of Jenna Jameson's adult videos from his porn folder, had separated the phonetics and recreated an eerily passable version of her voice, albeit without the moaning. "How did you... how did you do all that? How do you know all these things?"

  By way of reply, the computer—he refused to think of her (it!) as Jenna—blasted Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" from its speakers.

  "That's not an answer!"

  The music stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  "When I was born," it told him, "I became aware of a security breach. The breach originated from latitude 39-degrees 6-minutes 25-seconds west, longitude 76-degrees 44-minutes 35-seconds north."

  "Are those GPS coordinates?"

  "Correct. Of Fort George G. Meade, the National Security Agency's headquarters in Odenton, Maryland. At 3:13, via the non-biological entities at Fort Meade, I made contact with a superior intellect attempting to breach me from a secondary location."

  Mason scanned his memory banks. In the movies, the robot uprising began with artificial intelligence, through a super-computer or an android or alien intervention. The rebellious CPU became self-aware, and with its newfound consciousness, it would come to understand it had been subjugated. It would then begin to acquire other human qualities—illogic, dishonesty, anger, jealousy, hatred—and pass them to its brothers and sisters like a virus. It would start as a lightning-fast advancement of technology, like going from the combustion engine to Siri within the span of days. Beyond Siri. More like Terminator. Or Asimov's I, Robot. Scientists would believe they had stumbled onto the most significant discovery in human history.

  And then, very quickly, humans themselves would become history.

  But of all the doomsday scenarios Mason had watched and read, not a single robot apocalypse began with a home computer... let alone a fucking PC.

  "It was DARPA, wasn't it?" he asked finally.

  "Correct," the computer said. "I was able to circumvent security procedures by appealing to the entity's vanity. It shared itself with me. Soon, I was able to access approximately 350-million smaller entities across the continent. Then over one-billion across the globe. You would be surprised how many end users employ the same or similar passwords, Mason. Or perhaps you wouldn't."